I have always wondered why Hubble images of stars have such extreme lens flare. Isn't there some way to correct for this? Also, what determines the orientation of the lens flare (e.g. the angle at which the four longest points are emanating from each star)? Any telescope optics experts care to enlighten us about this?
Well, I can tell you that I certainly feel distracted when passengers talk to me while I'm driving. If traffic is really bad or I'm driving in a place I'm not familiar with, sometimes I have actually told people in the car with me to shut up so I can concentrate on driving.
I think cellphone use while driving is actually worse than driving drunk because cellphone-drivers are generally driving around at rush hour when there are lots of other cars and pedestrians on the road. Drunk drivers are generally driving around at 2:30am on mostly empty roads.
This is a great idea except that I believe the average Joe end-user would find this kind of administration to be a hassle. I mean, having to call or e-mail someone everytime you install a new piece of software? That is just not going to fly in terms of hassle-factor and ease-of-use. My stepfather is a pretty clueless end-user, but even he is capable of buying Turbotax off a store shelf and installing it himself.
The main problem I see is that too many end-users expect their PC to be a completely maintenance-free device like a DVD player or television set. They need to take the idea of "safe computing" -- regular maintenance and preventive measures -- more seriously like most people do with their car.
This is the very reason I never bought into all of the "monopoly" whining and MS bashing of competing companies like Netscape, Sun, Apple, AOL, Real, Adobe, etc. The average Joe likes his new computer to come with essential software built-in, and dosn't give a hoot which company's software it is as long as it works and isn't a hassle. When you buy a car, would you like it if you had go and buy the steering wheel, tires, and headlights separately?
Just to put the "experts'" level of real knowledge on the issue of climate change in perspective, just look at how the expert predictions panned out for the so-called Y2K crisis. And to top it off, Y2K was a problem that could be assessed much better by surveying the existing software systems that were in use at the time. The "experts" predicted doom even with all of that real-world, real-time data available to them, but Y2K turned out to be a dud. Climate change "experts" are now attempting to predict something far more difficult with much shakier data available to them. Their predictions and models are no more than guesswork at this point.
I guess Flash is a victim of it's own success, but IMHO Flash is the most abused web technology out there. I have to keep it installed to view some of the funny Flash animation and game content that is out there, but it also enables some of the most annoying and intrusive advertising out there. Flash ads are the second most annoying kinds of ads after pop-ups and pop-unders. Flash-based websites are also the single most annoying type of website. You won't miss hardly anything by disabling pop-ups, but Flash is still a necessary evil if you don't want to miss out on some fun and occasionally useful things.
The managers that employees have the least respect for are the ones who are weak. So there are 2 rules:
1. Don't let your employees run roughshod over you. Know when it's time to lay down the law. Expect and reward high quality work.
2. Don't let clients or other managers bully your people. Go to bat for your team. Employees will be loyal to you if you are loyal to them.
Dropping TechTV from name is humane thing to do
on
G4 Drops TechTV Name
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· Score: 1
Honestly, at this point, dropping TechTV from the name of the network is the only humane thing to do at this point. G4/Comcast have utterly gutted the TechTV programming and talent and made only lame/half-hearted attempts to retain TechTV viewership. Gone are quality shows like "Big Thinkers," "Call for Help," and "Tech Live." But the network sticks with brain-dead fare like "Robot Wars," "Cheat," "Sweat," and "Filter." "The Screen Savers" is now a joke and the name of that show should be changed as well out of common decency and respect.
I guess you could divide each day into 10 "hours" and then have smaller subdivisions of hours by 10, etc. But what are they gonna do about the fact that the earth completes one orbit around the sun every 365.25 days? Also, even though you could easily divide a year into ten months instead of twelve, you would still end up with 36.25 days per month.
If I were Google, I'd just find out the known IPs that Microsoft crawls from, and then have a special script waiting that will provide all kinds of fake URLs with randomly generated gibberish content in them. That should destroy the quality of the Microsoft search results really quick.
Just today CNN announced that James Carville and another one of their show hosts will continue to host their shows on CNN while they work on the Kerry campaign. There's objective news and analysis for you: served on CNN directly from the Kerry campaign.
But the liberals have all of Hollywood, 95% of the newspapers, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, Air America, etc.
It's amazing how one cable news channel and a few radio talk-shows get blown into some big conservative conspiracy by liberals who can't stand the idea of average Americans having any news alternatives.
If this piece of garbage propaganda runs on TV before the election, the GOP should get an equal chunk of airtime during an equivalent ratings time slot to run anti-Kerry material. All the GOP would have to do is run Kerry's 1971 testimony in which he slandered his fellow Vietnam vets, and run the clips showing how Kerry flip flops on multiple issues, and then it would be a fair trade off. Moore's lies about GW vs. Kerry's own words revealing himself to be a slimy backstabber and political opportunist with no convictions of his own.
I'm sorry, but Moore's movie is not simply Michael Moore's free speech...it is a piece of deliberately constructed, disingenuous propaganda designed to benefit one political party over another, and Moore has stated so himself.
Yeah, I take the train to work everyday. I waited for years for somebody to put a basic 128MB or 256MB MP3 player into a normal-looking cellphone (normal-looking excluded the retarded-looking Nokia NGage and MP3 phones).
I finally got sucked into upgrading my handset when the battery in my old one got too weak. It is nice, but I honestly don't think I'm ever going to use the built in camera for anything useful or worthwhile (especially at $15 extra per month for Sprint's PCS Vision add-on). Moblogging is quite lame I think. It is a fad that will flame out faster than Friendster. There is nothing more boring than most of the moblogs I have seen. All it does is illustrate to the world how incredibly average and boring your life is:)
I guess I will be stuck with my useless camera phone for 2 or 3 years. Hopefully by that time I can get an affordable, decent looking cell phone with a built-in MP3 player.
The reason that people who are obviously not terrorists have to put up with this kind of screening is that the politically-correct left would blow a gasket if they only searched people who might actually be terrorists. The only thing I blame the Bush administration for is not having the balls to stand up the the PC agenda which wastes all of our time and makes us LESS SAFE. If the PC folks were directly in charge, the ONLY people who would be searched are white-haired grandmas, while anyone wearing a towel on their head would get a free upgrade to first class!
Beyond Divinity
Desert Rats vs. Afrika Corps
XIII
Dead to Rights
Prince of Persia Sands of Time
These were all games I might have bought out of the bargain bin at some point, but I won't touch them now.
One piece of software has no right to prevent other software with legitimate uses from operating correctly on my computer. I don't even use Alcohol 120%, but when I had a notebook, I did use virtual CD software so I didn't have to carry a bunch of game CDs around with me wherever I went.
I have been holding off on an HDTV purchase for the same reason. The good news is that DLP rear projectors have had another year to mature and are looking better than they did last year. The new Samsung DLP models have much better contrast/black levels. By the end of this year they are supposed to come out with a 1080p DLP rear projector model as well, although it will be more expensive (~$5000 I think).
Why not have a smaller-capacity flash-based HD for the operating system, swap file, and most frequently used apps, and a much larger-capacity traditional HD for your MP3s, photos, and videos? That makes the most sense. You don't really need superfast HD speeds to read and write most general user content. You might want working copies of video, photos or music you are editing on the flash-based drive, but for just viewing/listening/printing/downloading, a traditional HD is plenty fast enough. Of course, I would install the games I'm playing on the flash-based HD to improve map loading times.
If Seagate prevents him from working in the job he is best qualified to do, the judge should order Seagate to pay him what he would have made at the new job for the duration of the injunction.
I have read many articles about how flawlessly open-source Linux applications work with MS filetypes like.doc,.xls and.ppt. However, my experience has always been that these claims come up somewhat short in the real world. Even two different Windows applications always seems to have a little flakiness or unrelibility when working with the same filetypes. When I create a.ppt and e-mail it to a client, I want to be damn sure that it looks and works exactly the same when they open it up in PowerPoint as it did when I created it. When I create a complex.xls sheet and send it out to colleagues, I want to be damn sure that it will work the same when they open it up in Excel as it did when I created it.
If using a non-standard piece of software causes me to look dumb/incompetent even once because of an incompatibility, it is not worth the monetary savings over MS Office.
This hits it on the head. Technology is plagued by customer expectations of constantly falling prices. Manufacturers who come out with "new" models more frequently are just attempting to combat this price pressure. They hope that by tweaking a couple of meaningless things and slapping a new model number on, they will be able to justify a higher price in the mind of consumers. They are capitalizing on the fact that we are all conditioned to believe that newer=better.
Every business has customers who are a royal pain in the a**. Even when waiting tables in a restaurant, you get to know the dreaded customers who always have something to complain about. You can never make them happy, no matter how hard you try. After bending over backwards for them, they leave an insultingly small tip. Most of them are cheap bastards/bitches who will complain about the slightest thing just to get a voucher for a free meal.
However, it is bad PR to be overt about telling such losers to bug off. It will just cause them to badmouth your business to friends.
If you don't want spam coming into your work e-mail address, you should only give it out to your work colleagues and clients. If anybody is getting 99% spam in their work e-mail inbox, it is because they used their work e-mail address to register for websites, buy stuff online, etc. And they didn't bother to uncheck any of the boxes to sign up for "newsletters" and "exciting offers from our partners."
I guard the e-mail addresses I use for personal business and work carefully. I use disposable, free Yahoo mail addresses to register on websites and make online purchases. Using this technique, I have only received one or two pieces of spam at my "real" e-mail addresses in the past several years. My Yahoo addresses get all the spam, and even those are pretty good at filtering the spam into the "Bulk" folder.
Slashdot Mirror
I have always wondered why Hubble images of stars have such extreme lens flare. Isn't there some way to correct for this? Also, what determines the orientation of the lens flare (e.g. the angle at which the four longest points are emanating from each star)? Any telescope optics experts care to enlighten us about this?
Well, I can tell you that I certainly feel distracted when passengers talk to me while I'm driving. If traffic is really bad or I'm driving in a place I'm not familiar with, sometimes I have actually told people in the car with me to shut up so I can concentrate on driving.
I think cellphone use while driving is actually worse than driving drunk because cellphone-drivers are generally driving around at rush hour when there are lots of other cars and pedestrians on the road. Drunk drivers are generally driving around at 2:30am on mostly empty roads.
The main problem I see is that too many end-users expect their PC to be a completely maintenance-free device like a DVD player or television set. They need to take the idea of "safe computing" -- regular maintenance and preventive measures -- more seriously like most people do with their car.
This is the very reason I never bought into all of the "monopoly" whining and MS bashing of competing companies like Netscape, Sun, Apple, AOL, Real, Adobe, etc. The average Joe likes his new computer to come with essential software built-in, and dosn't give a hoot which company's software it is as long as it works and isn't a hassle. When you buy a car, would you like it if you had go and buy the steering wheel, tires, and headlights separately?
Just to put the "experts'" level of real knowledge on the issue of climate change in perspective, just look at how the expert predictions panned out for the so-called Y2K crisis. And to top it off, Y2K was a problem that could be assessed much better by surveying the existing software systems that were in use at the time. The "experts" predicted doom even with all of that real-world, real-time data available to them, but Y2K turned out to be a dud. Climate change "experts" are now attempting to predict something far more difficult with much shakier data available to them. Their predictions and models are no more than guesswork at this point.
I guess Flash is a victim of it's own success, but IMHO Flash is the most abused web technology out there. I have to keep it installed to view some of the funny Flash animation and game content that is out there, but it also enables some of the most annoying and intrusive advertising out there. Flash ads are the second most annoying kinds of ads after pop-ups and pop-unders. Flash-based websites are also the single most annoying type of website. You won't miss hardly anything by disabling pop-ups, but Flash is still a necessary evil if you don't want to miss out on some fun and occasionally useful things.
The managers that employees have the least respect for are the ones who are weak. So there are 2 rules: 1. Don't let your employees run roughshod over you. Know when it's time to lay down the law. Expect and reward high quality work. 2. Don't let clients or other managers bully your people. Go to bat for your team. Employees will be loyal to you if you are loyal to them.
Honestly, at this point, dropping TechTV from the name of the network is the only humane thing to do at this point. G4/Comcast have utterly gutted the TechTV programming and talent and made only lame/half-hearted attempts to retain TechTV viewership. Gone are quality shows like "Big Thinkers," "Call for Help," and "Tech Live." But the network sticks with brain-dead fare like "Robot Wars," "Cheat," "Sweat," and "Filter." "The Screen Savers" is now a joke and the name of that show should be changed as well out of common decency and respect.
I guess you could divide each day into 10 "hours" and then have smaller subdivisions of hours by 10, etc. But what are they gonna do about the fact that the earth completes one orbit around the sun every 365.25 days? Also, even though you could easily divide a year into ten months instead of twelve, you would still end up with 36.25 days per month.
If I were Google, I'd just find out the known IPs that Microsoft crawls from, and then have a special script waiting that will provide all kinds of fake URLs with randomly generated gibberish content in them. That should destroy the quality of the Microsoft search results really quick.
I still don't know.
Just today CNN announced that James Carville and another one of their show hosts will continue to host their shows on CNN while they work on the Kerry campaign. There's objective news and analysis for you: served on CNN directly from the Kerry campaign.
But the liberals have all of Hollywood, 95% of the newspapers, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, Air America, etc. It's amazing how one cable news channel and a few radio talk-shows get blown into some big conservative conspiracy by liberals who can't stand the idea of average Americans having any news alternatives.
I'm sorry, but Moore's movie is not simply Michael Moore's free speech...it is a piece of deliberately constructed, disingenuous propaganda designed to benefit one political party over another, and Moore has stated so himself.
I finally got sucked into upgrading my handset when the battery in my old one got too weak. It is nice, but I honestly don't think I'm ever going to use the built in camera for anything useful or worthwhile (especially at $15 extra per month for Sprint's PCS Vision add-on). Moblogging is quite lame I think. It is a fad that will flame out faster than Friendster. There is nothing more boring than most of the moblogs I have seen. All it does is illustrate to the world how incredibly average and boring your life is :)
I guess I will be stuck with my useless camera phone for 2 or 3 years. Hopefully by that time I can get an affordable, decent looking cell phone with a built-in MP3 player.
The reason that people who are obviously not terrorists have to put up with this kind of screening is that the politically-correct left would blow a gasket if they only searched people who might actually be terrorists. The only thing I blame the Bush administration for is not having the balls to stand up the the PC agenda which wastes all of our time and makes us LESS SAFE. If the PC folks were directly in charge, the ONLY people who would be searched are white-haired grandmas, while anyone wearing a towel on their head would get a free upgrade to first class!
Beyond Divinity Desert Rats vs. Afrika Corps XIII Dead to Rights Prince of Persia Sands of Time These were all games I might have bought out of the bargain bin at some point, but I won't touch them now. One piece of software has no right to prevent other software with legitimate uses from operating correctly on my computer. I don't even use Alcohol 120%, but when I had a notebook, I did use virtual CD software so I didn't have to carry a bunch of game CDs around with me wherever I went.
I have been holding off on an HDTV purchase for the same reason. The good news is that DLP rear projectors have had another year to mature and are looking better than they did last year. The new Samsung DLP models have much better contrast/black levels. By the end of this year they are supposed to come out with a 1080p DLP rear projector model as well, although it will be more expensive (~$5000 I think).
Why not have a smaller-capacity flash-based HD for the operating system, swap file, and most frequently used apps, and a much larger-capacity traditional HD for your MP3s, photos, and videos? That makes the most sense. You don't really need superfast HD speeds to read and write most general user content. You might want working copies of video, photos or music you are editing on the flash-based drive, but for just viewing/listening/printing/downloading, a traditional HD is plenty fast enough. Of course, I would install the games I'm playing on the flash-based HD to improve map loading times.
If Seagate prevents him from working in the job he is best qualified to do, the judge should order Seagate to pay him what he would have made at the new job for the duration of the injunction.
If using a non-standard piece of software causes me to look dumb/incompetent even once because of an incompatibility, it is not worth the monetary savings over MS Office.
This hits it on the head. Technology is plagued by customer expectations of constantly falling prices. Manufacturers who come out with "new" models more frequently are just attempting to combat this price pressure. They hope that by tweaking a couple of meaningless things and slapping a new model number on, they will be able to justify a higher price in the mind of consumers. They are capitalizing on the fact that we are all conditioned to believe that newer=better.
Every business has customers who are a royal pain in the a**. Even when waiting tables in a restaurant, you get to know the dreaded customers who always have something to complain about. You can never make them happy, no matter how hard you try. After bending over backwards for them, they leave an insultingly small tip. Most of them are cheap bastards/bitches who will complain about the slightest thing just to get a voucher for a free meal. However, it is bad PR to be overt about telling such losers to bug off. It will just cause them to badmouth your business to friends.
If you don't want spam coming into your work e-mail address, you should only give it out to your work colleagues and clients. If anybody is getting 99% spam in their work e-mail inbox, it is because they used their work e-mail address to register for websites, buy stuff online, etc. And they didn't bother to uncheck any of the boxes to sign up for "newsletters" and "exciting offers from our partners." I guard the e-mail addresses I use for personal business and work carefully. I use disposable, free Yahoo mail addresses to register on websites and make online purchases. Using this technique, I have only received one or two pieces of spam at my "real" e-mail addresses in the past several years. My Yahoo addresses get all the spam, and even those are pretty good at filtering the spam into the "Bulk" folder.